Tag: smart growth
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Mobility vs. Access, Chesterfield vs. Manhattan
by James A. Bacon Luke Juday, writing in his personal blog, “Mapping the Commonwealth,” picks up the cudgel against a recent Wendell Cox essay that I inveighed against in, “Subsidize It, and They Will Come.” While I focused on the idea that a metropolitan strategy of building your way out of congestion is fiscal folly,…
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Menu Items on the Free Lunch Smorgasbord
Last week I published “Lean Urbanism and the Bureaucratic State,” a post that described a New Urbanist project to rectify the baleful effects of excess regulation upon urban re-development efforts. Questions arose in the comments regarding this initiative. What were these terrible regulations? Were the New Urbanists exaggerating the costs they imposed? Reader Richard N.…
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Terry McAuliffe: Working Hard to Make His Own Mistakes
Governor Terry McAuliffe is working hard to clean up the transportation boondoggles of the McDonnell administration — but how many new boondoggles will he create of his own making? Yesterday, the governor announced $13.1 billion in transportation capital expenditures after making final adjustments to the state’s Six-Year Improvement Plan. In the announcement, McAuliffe made much of…
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Subsidize It, and They Will Come
by James A. Bacon There is a particular intersection near where I live in Henrico County — Patterson Avenue and Parham Road — that gets really jammed up during rush hour and sets my teeth to grinding. I hate it. I curse it. I give its traffic signals the finger. (Yes, I do have incipient road…
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Suburbia’s Silent Storm Water Crisis
America’s older suburbs may face an infrastructure crisis from the last place they expect — aging storm water management systems. In a presentation at the annual LOCUS conference in Washington, D.C., this morning, Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of “Retrofitting Suburbia,” listed a number of factors driving the re-development of America’s suburbs. They include the usual suspects…
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The Rise of Walkable Urbanism and “the End of Sprawl”
by James A. Bacon The Washington metropolitan region is the national model for “walkable urbanism” in the United States — more so even than metropolitan New York, according to the findings of “Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros,” a report released this morning by LOCUS, an organization of smart-growth real estate developers, and Smart…
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Want to Combat Noise Pollution? Measure It
I’m a big fan of city life but I’m the first to acknowledge that there are drawbacks to crowding and congestion. The foremost of those is noise. Cities are noisier than the burbs and the countryside. The older I get (I’m 61 now), the larger the noise factor looms in my consideration of things. Even…
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Will Virginia Embrace the Coming Transportation Revolution or Thwart It?
by James A. Bacon Has Virginia has given up any pretext of being a market- or innovation-friendly state? The Department of Motor Vehicles has issued cease-and-desist orders to the Uber and Lyft ride-sharing service and slapped the companies with a total of $35,000 in fines. Their offense? Operating order-a-ride-with-a-smart-phone services and giving traditional taxicab companies a…
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Lean Urbanism and the Bureaucratic State
by James A. Bacon The really big idea to emerge from the 2014 Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) was “lean urbanism.” The idea isn’t entirely new. Andres Duany, New Urbanism guru and the driving force behind “lean” urbanism, has been publicly discussing the idea for a year or more. But he used the annual confab…
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Safer Streets Require Less Traffic Engineering, Not More
by James A. Bacon A week or two ago, I lamented the disparity between the high cost of traffic accidents in Virginia and the paltry resources devoted to reducing their number. But to say that insufficient attention is being paid to the issue is not to say that no attention is being paid. According to Virginia’s 2012-2015 Strategic…
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The Smart Transit Revolution
by James A. Bacon Bridj, a Boston start-up, bills itself as “the world’s first smart transit system which uses big data and luxury shuttles to adjust to your individual commuting needs.” The company charges $6 per ride, or three times that of a city bus, but it provides Wi-Fi connectivity and luxury seats, and it saves…
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Mobile Homes, Wealth Accumulation and the Poor
by James A. Bacon Manufactured dwellings — mobile homes, trailers, call them what you will — are a major source of affordable housing in the United States. But a few market reforms would make them even more affordable to lower- and middle-income families and make them better vehicles for accumulating wealth. That was the message…
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What Makes a Resilient Community?
by James A. Bacon During the depths of the Great Recession in 2008, hundreds of cars dropped off the Department of Motor Vehicle rolls in Washington, D.C. As then-director of planning Harriet Tregoning parsed the data, people were dialing back their expenses to make ends meet. Yes, that was a sign of economic hardship but it…
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Deconstructing Duany
by James A. Bacon Never in all the times over the years that I have heard Andres Duany speak, nor in those occasions in which I interviewed him, have I heard him utter a scintilla of partisan political sentiment. If I had to guess, I would say that he disdains both political parties. As he said yesterday of…
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Lean Urbanism: Cheaper, Faster, Smaller
by James A. Bacon Andres Duany, the leading theorist of the New Urbanism movement, has toured Detroit seven or eight times. The first trips consisted of what he calls “ruin porn” — post-apocalyptic landscapes of tumble-down houses, weeded lots and decrepit public buildings. But the most recent trip was very different. His guide conducted him through an…